These sound like examples of tapping into cognitive computing capabilities, but what other big tech vendor are trying to bring cognitive computing capabilities to the enterprise? I asked John Gordon of the IBM Watson Group this question yesterday and he couldn't name any. He did mention a few universities that are doing research in this area. What I meant is that IBM is virtually alone in trying to commercialize cognitive computing.

Connected-Computing era is a reality and in place, though lot of connected and slow processing all put together, which need to improve upon, while cognitive computing era is still yet to get up and running or should i say in the works....So both has a long way to go to gain a lot in terms of its maturity and hope will be able to engage a lot of people in society overall...

IBM is far from alone in cognitive computing. It is the same contact behind Siri, Google Now, and the forthcoming Microsoftt personal assistant. It is also behind much of the robotics research. I would also argue that the Internet of Whatever is not a competing concept, but rather a complementary one that will allow cognifitive computing to accumulate more and more data to cogitate upon.

Salesforce.com's "vision" isn't a vision at all. It's a me-too proposition. Lots of vendors are slapping their own label on the Internet of Things (GE: Industrial Internet, Cisco: Internet Of Everything, etc.), and now Salesforce.com has Internet Of Customers. It's not all that impressive. At least IBM is sticking its neck out. We'll see whether the big commercial opportunities will follow.

So are we entering the connected-computing era or the cognitive-computing era? What's your view on which one is more important, more real, and which one will have bigger implications over the long term?

ITís tried for years to simplify data analytics and business intelligence efforts. Have visual analysis tools and Hadoop and NoSQL databases helped? Respondents to our 2014 InformationWeek Analytics, Business Intelligence, and Information Management Survey have a mixed outlook.